Impertinent Questions: Irigaray, Sade, Lacan

Abstract

Luce Irigaray's Speculum (Minuit, 1974) reproduces various texts representative of Western thought and, by simply curving the reproductive mirror, exposes the phallocentric assumptions underlying the entire tradition. The first third of the book is a detailed reflection on Freud-loving, but with a tender resentment that the Father of Psychoanalysis never adequately exposed his desire for his hysterics/daughters. Irigaray resents Freudian theory's refusal to engage the otherness of female sexuality. In Freud's writings woman is either a lesser, castrated man, or woman is mother, necessary ground for phallic reproduction. Irigaray's delineation of Freud's phallocentric exclusion of the real female who is more than a mere complement to the phallic male recalls a moment in Freud's delineation of infantile sexuality. Freud named the last stage of infantile sexuality the phallic phase. In the phallic phase, the partial drives are subordinated to a central genital organization, but only one kind of genital organ comes into account-the male.' Fascinated by children's sexual theories,2 Freud finds that children in the phallic phase hypothesize the anus as phallic receptacle, and attempt to think the familiar anus as the legendary maternal womb. At the same time the real female genitals never seem to be discovered (Freud, op. cit., p. 175, italics mine). As Irigaray reads Freud, Freudian theory appears to be arrested in the phallic phase. The Freud Irigaray reads and resents is Jacques Lacan's version of Freud. Nevertheless, Speculum never mentions the name Jacques Lacan. However the mark of Lacan's influence3 can be seen in a less expected place than the reading of Freud; it appears in Irigaray's reading of (Un a priori paradoxal, Speculum, pp. 253-267). Irigaray bears down on the Critique of Practical Reason, where she finds an interest in pain and suffering as gratifying signs of one's obedience to the Law. Shall we in this way place with [mettrons-nous la avec Sade]? (p. 265), she asks. Kant avec Sade (Kant with Sade) is the title of an article by Lacan on the Critique of Practical Reason which demonstrates the same sort of perversities in as Irigaray finds.